Too Much Heat?

Meet the world’s hottest pepper: PEPPER X. It’s the latest in a line of extremely spicy peppers and almost three times as hot as the previous record holder, the Carolina Reaper. Only five people have eaten it—including its creator, Ed Currie. The pepper caused cramps so painful that he was violently ill for three hours!

When you bite into a spicy pepper, receptors on your tongue tell your brain you’re overheating. Your body heats up, you sweat, and your mouth burns. It feels like you’re on fire! This reaction can cause nausea, cramps, and intense headaches. Capsaicin—the molecule that makes peppers spicy—is technically harmless. But doctors warn that if you eat too much of it at once, it can have dangerous effects and cause extreme pain—so don’t overdo it!

If peppers had their way, humans and other mammals wouldn’t eat them at all. “The capsaicin molecule is a way for the pepper to protect itself from creatures they don’t want eating it,” says Brooke Lorenzetti, an edible-plant expert at the New York Botanical Garden in New York City. Birds don’t react to capsaicin and can munch on peppers without pain. They then poop out the pepper’s seeds, helping new peppers grow.

In small doses, capsaicin can be medicinal. It’s great for clearing out a stuffy nose! But Lorenzetti warns, “If you have too much, or you have these dense and concentrated varieties, it’s going to do some damage.”